I _HATE_ getting fliers jammed into my letter box. I feel almost as violated as when I get marketing calls. What gives them the right to use my property like that and disturb me in my home? Not only that it's a blatant waste of resources, and I have to go to the effort of putting them in the paper recycling.
I can't see anything at all wrong with this. This is a classic business connecting a group of buyers and sellers who wouldn't have otherwise been connected. The sellers get their book sale and the buyers get their book at a reasonable price. Everyone wins. No different from any other shop that buys at factory price and sells at retail price.
After watching the video I don't think the IBM computer shown is meant to be in a Soviet facility. They talk about how the sound being played at the time is an actual signal from the Sputnik, which makes me think that it's meant to be an American signals interception facility. Maybe even with the IBM logo added to make that clear
Either that or they weren't immune to product placement in the 50's;) Either way an awesome video.
1) CEOs proposed it and everyone knows they're all evil
When a group of IT company CEO's propose that you spend huge amounts on new IT infrastructure to consolidate your spending, you'd do damned well to look at it with suspicion. Especially when they appear to have neglected subtracting the amount that would have to be spent to realise these savings from their final figures.
I'm not sure what all the upset in the summary is about (Other than pulling eyeballs). This guy sounds like he actually knows what he is doing. He hasn't jumped on the panic bandwagon. In fact he's said a number of very logical things:
- Not all cyber attacks are a matter of national security. Even attacks on government infrastructure aren't necessarily matters of espionage.
- Conventional military strategies have nothing to do with maintaining a robust IT infrastructure.
That seems fairly level headed to me. Rather than all this panic about cyber-warfare as a broad collection of laws I'd like to see:
- Liability for corporations who fail to take basic security steps to protect customer data. E.g. you're in-house system gets compromised by an SQL-injection then you're liable. There is no reasonable excuse to still be running system vulnerable to SQL-injection. Or your un-patched systems are compromised then you're liable.
- Liability for software makers who sell software with easily preventable flaws. E.g. SQL-injections. I raise the point of SQL-injections because automatically checking code for insertion of strings into SQL statements should be trivial.
P.s. Sorry for the first and second halve of the post being only somewhat related.
Agree. In modern terms a 92% tax on income over $5,000,000 or so post deductions wouldn't be at all unreasonable, in my opinion. While I'm sure there are hard working CIOs, I doubt that they work so much harder and so much better than everyone else that it justifies them earning millions of dollars more than, for example, even extremely hard-working, extremely skilled, senior engineers at the same company.
Also tax investment earnings.etc. as normal income. Close the blatant loopholes.
Electronic dictionaries for a long time have allowed note taking and modern dictionaries although small and dedicated are also often complete personal computers with wi-fi connectivity. My university had a policy of completely banning electronic dictionaries. Students could use a paper dictionary and that's it.
Any student who's taking regular classes at a university (or college in the States) should have passed an English test as part of their entry requirements. If their English is not up to scratch they should also have spent time doing supplementary study at an English college. I took regularly classes at a university in a country where I didn't speak the language natively. In any subject (and especially science subjects) a relatively small number of clearly defined terms will come out again and again in the course of studying the materials. It's hard to imagine how someone could fail to memorise those terms if they've studied properly.
Basically it talks about study methods backed up by psychological studies. Amongst that one of the more interesting points is that because of the difficulty of recalling knowledge in them, exams are a powerful tool for increasing the ability of students to recall knowledge.
Now I understand that what you're saying is that it's not necessary to memorise masses of equations because they can be looked up. However, it would seem necessary for students to have a working in memory knowledge of the principles of a field of knowledge, even if they can't remember the exact equations. Exams can be a powerful tool for helping students build that knowledge.
Btw. I'm surprised the original posters university doesn't have a blanket policy on dictionaries.etc. A blanket policy would prevent exactly the kind of situation as what arose with the Korean girl.
Oh and on a side note most electronic dictionaries for a long time have allowed note taking in them and newer more expensive ones are basically complete computers with wifi connectivity. So anybody setting an exam should keep that in mind.
Although, personally, and having experienced studying overseas in normal classes (as opposed to language classes) in an environment where I wasn't a native speaker of the language, I think allowing any dictionaries in exams is a bit silly. Realistically if a student has learnt the materials properly they should be able to write about it. If they haven't mastered the jargon related to their field of study, then I think that raises serious questions about their knowledge of the field.
Getting a bit OT, but my original point is, if you're complaining about having to write your name in Katakana, then it wouldn't be fair to say that Japanese could work around the English site by filling in English forms using Roman characters. I know most of them are used to doing this, but still.
I have no problem with using Katakana. It's when you add character limits and so on on top of that when it becomes a problem.
I'm no Japanese, but I guess the vast majority of English websites would simply fail if you tried using a Japanese name (with Japanese characters). Worse, they might pretend to succeed and then get the encoding completely botched up
I've never meet a Japanese person who has issue fitting their name in English language forms. They just write it in roman characters.
The inverse is much harder when faced with arbitrary character limits and characters such as spaces being made illegal characters (particularly hard when you're trying to fit your first and middle name into a middle name field). This means often the only solution is tricks like using initials in roman characters from the wide-latin character set that is used in East Asian language computing.
I don't care if they keep or drop the policy at this point. I'm still not going to vote for them. They've shown their colours. Hopefully other voters who care about this issue are the same and show them that we care because Australia doesn't need both its major political parties appealing to the Christian right.
I find English websites are generally fairly good at handling names. At least in comparison to Japanese websites, which assume that you have a first name and last name only and often assume that your name can be written in only a few characters. They also have a nasty habit of deciding that certain characters are illegal.
It's always interesting trying to find ways to fit my 19 character full name into subscription forms on Japanese websites. Perhaps the worst one I encountered required me to use the initial of my first name using a full-width roman character (They banned ASCII characters so I had to use a roman character from the Japanese character set) and my last name written in Katakana.
Any fellow Aussie slashdoters have good recommendation for way to vote in protest to this kind of legislation?
I'm thinking of voting for the Greens in both houses. But I'm also wondering where to spread my preferences. Other than to the liberals and labor that is...
It's truly a sad period in our nations history when we have choices as abysmal as Tony Abbot and Kevin Rudd.
It's much easier to learn Chinese characters in Chinese than it is in Japanese because the phonetic portions for each character are maintained and the readings of the character is reflected in its structure. Furthermore you generally only have 1 reading per character.
In Japanese most characters have a Sino reading and a Japanese reading. The Sino reading can sometimes be deduced from the structure of the character however the Japanese reading is completely arbitrary and often changes completely based on the phonetic characters that follow it or even simply based on context.
For example the Japanese word for "to go" is "iku" and the Japanese word for "to hold" (a party, event.etc.) is "okonau". Both are written with the same character with the reading changing depending on the character following it. The past tense and conjunctive forms of the above verbs are written identically. However are of course read completely different. (itta / itte and okonatta / okonatte respectively). Furthermore the same character also has multiple Sino-readings associated with it. The main ones being "kou", "gou", and "gyou". These are used when the character is used as part of a "jukugo" (Nouns constructed with Chinese morphemes). Finally on top of that you have exceptional readings. For example the same character is used to write the "an" in "anka" (foot warmer).
The worst by far though is names. Often Japanee people themselves can't read names correctly without knowing beforehand what the place is called. A favourite example of mine is the place name "Kasuga". It's written with the characters for spring and day. Now the Japanese words for spring and day are "haru" and "hi" respectively. So you would think when combined they would be read "haruhi" (And when used for people's names they are read "haruhi" when combined). If not "haruhi" another logical reading would be "shunjitsu" (using the Chinese readings of the character) and indeed there is a noun in Japanese read "Shunjitsu" which means spring day. However in place names for whatever reason when those two characters combine their reading changes to the completely arbitrary "Kasuga".
Now try learning that for several thousand characters and that's not to count the 1000 odd characters which aren't on the list but you need to know anyway if you want to be literate.
I've been learning Japanese for 4 years and have level 1 of the JLPT and I can say with confidence that this doesn't complicate anything for learners at all. If you're at all serious about learning Japanese you'll need to accept that the Jouyou-Kanji-Hyou (the list being discussed here) is not the definitive guide and you have to know lots of characters beyond that list. Most people would say about 3000 characters at least for literacy.
Government agencies might choose to avoid using kanji not on it. However they often ignore it. Some newspapers now days pay attention to it and replace characters not on it with katakana. For example 'hatan' is often written in newspapers with the character for 'yaburu' (i.e. 'ha') followed by tan written in katakana. Although even government agencies and newspapers use some characters which aren't on it. Everyone else just ignores it and uses whatever characters they see fit.
It was never designed to assist Japanese learners and (at least previously) contained some extremely rare characters which you seldom see used which omitting extremely common characters that you'd expect even a 8 year old to be able to read. (An 8 year old Japanese kid that is obviously)
P.s. According to the comments on the slashdot.jp article the characters mentioned there are a hidden reference to some dating sims titles (Or however you want to translate eroge).
Communication lag and inflexibility. That's why humans can do much, much more (like many orders of magnitude more) than any currently imaginable robot. Communication lag and inflexibility.
So why not put our efforts into improved AI systems? Obstacle avoidance doesn't seem exactly like an insurmountable problem. It seems a lot more realistic to develop better robotic technology than it does to send a human to mars. As a bonus the applications in industry of improved robotics technologies are huge.
Because what the Rovers have accomplished in [roughly] 4000 rover days could have been done in [roughly] 20 man days and probably done better to boot.
Are we talking Earth days are we talking Martian days? What's the basis of your estimate? For the cost of getting a man to Mars and back how much research could we do into robotic exploration? How much better could we make them? I'm still not seeing the value proposition of sending humans there.
That's the theory. In practice, the missions are almost always one shots, if a probe is lost it's game over for that mission. (The sole exception on Mars to date is the Phoenix lander, a cobbled together low budget 'replacement' for the lost Mars Polar Lander.)
Yeah and if the mission fails it's a pity and you move on. End of story. If a human dies in space it's a national tragedy and a huge failure. Either one is at risk of failure it's just that a failed non-manned mission is nowhere near as much of a setback in terms of moral or otherwise.
Private companies will not undertake the large-scale, visionary projects like sending people to Mars, building permanent bases on Mars and Moon, reaching Europa and exploring her oceans.
You don't need manned space flight to do any of those things. In-fact manned space flight is a terrible way to do those things. We're already doing awesome things and producing great science using robots. Why on earth would you want to do it with humans?
- We need food and oxygen. We can't run on solar power. Food and oxygen is added weight which given the cost of launching is the last thing you need.
- The risk of failure is much higher. If a human life is lost then it's a huge tragedy and setback. If a robot is lost it's a financial setback and you sit down and work out what went wrong and then have another go. No huge political or moral setback.
- We can push our knowledge of robotics to the limit and make new discoveries related to robotics.
When Obama said he'll cancel Constellation, he crushed the dreams and hopes of MY generation. I'm in my 20's and I didn't feel very crushed. Let's say we do go back to the moon. What're people going to say? I'm imagining it would go something like: "Oh great we did that half a century ago. What's new?" Certainly going to Mars would be an enormous victory but you need to balance between spending huge amounts of money on something which has enormous propaganda but huge risks associated with failure vs. spending relatively little continuing to send robots up and generating tonnes of new scientific knowledge.
Google would be able to "diverge" its Android OS from the modifications made by the mobile phone operators - this would force them to rewrite their modifications from a version of Android to another, or to start back-porting into the version of Android they started with any change Google made.
Why would handset makers care about google "diverging" it's modifications? It's not like handset makers have exactly been known to care about keeping users up to date with the latest version. They could just take a snap shot of the Android code base make all the modifications they need and then run with it.
Do you know that the servers the government purchased to run these have memor that's... made in Taiwan! Where the average annual income for a factory worker [taipeitimes.com] is a paltry US$1,150.00 annually! And don't even get me started on where the plastic casings came for the keyboards, servers and mice that comprise these servers!
Given Taiwan's status as almost a developed country $1150 annually seemed like a rather suspicious figure. So I read your linked article. It doesn't give a figure for factory workers but it puts the average worker at NT$36,564 per _month_. Or according to the first currency conversion site that came up on google about USD$1200 per month which is a hell of a lot higher than $1150 annually.
When the bubble economy [wikipedia.org] burst in 1990, the earning power of the Japanese male burst as well. The old assumptions collapsed. You didn't graduate a prestigious university and get a job for life. Much of the excesses of Sarariman life was forgiven because, well, he would bring home the salary. Now, after the burst of the bubble economy, employment was scarce and tenuous.
Although I doubt the bubble collapse helped, birth rates in Japan were on the way down long before that. It's been the same in Western societies with very liberal views towards women so I'm not sure you can say there is a correlation. I think the bigger problem for Japan is that the government has really failed to provide any support for parents. Also the last few generations have all moved from the countryside to the big cities but who would want to bring up children in those urban masses. Rent is hideously expensive and rooms are small and urban environments just aren't that nice a place to bring up children.
If an agent of INTERPOL is "just doing his job" then he can do whatever he wants. Fortunately for us INTERPOL is very limited in what it can do.
INTERPOL's constitution is very clear as Article 3 states: It is strictly forbidden for the Organization to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character. http://www.interpol.int/public/icpo/legalmaterials/constitution/constitutiongenreg/constitution.asp [interpol.int]
Interpol doesn't even have agents or conduct investigations. Which makes any uproar even more silly.
Construction hubris and economic crash seem to be close companions.
Come on think about it for a bit. They didn't build this in the last few months. Burj Dubai was started during an economic boom. I doubt anyone was predicting that it would be completed in an economic crash.
Although you are right about construction and economic downturn going hand in hand. It's a great way for government to keep people employed reducing discontent. It can potentially have some follow through stimulus effects. It can be seen as a form of investment. I.e. the infrastructure has future value (generally speaking).
"The right to profit of your creation" doesn't necessarily imply "artificial scarcity", that's just one of the (many) models we've found for it.
I'm wondering what other models you know of and what their strength's and weaknesses are compared to a limited period of control over your creation. I'm not asking this to argue with you. I'm generally interested about what other models exist which offer sufficient profit incentives to get people to produce information (Be it books, movies, software whatever).
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away."
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers.etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
Take the iPhone for example. The materials that go into making an iPhone and those that go into making your average run of the mill phone are certainly not different enough to justify the price difference. The real difference is in the design - I.e. pure information with effectively no-limits to the amount it can be copied. Yet another company can't just use that information without Apple's permission - I.e. they can't just go off an make their own iPhone. Is this "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity" bad?
Or take Windows or any other peace of commercial software. It's purely information so the fact that I'm not free to copy and use it as much as I want must be "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity". Is this bad?
The point is that making this information takes very real time and effort, whether it's designing a phone (or car or whatever), writing software, making a movie/song, or in this case writing a book. So what is so wrong with people having the right to demand payment for allowing people to utilise (Be it for entertainment, business or whatever) the information they have worked hard to create?
Now I'm not saying there shouldn't be limits to this right. But it seems that a lot of people just shout "Artificial scarcity" at anyone who raises their voice against piracy or whatever.
Now as for this guy, I think correlating the open source movement and piracy is stupid. People pirate stuff because they want things for free and the risks are so low. That's human nature, with or without the open-source movement.
Slashdot Mirror
I _HATE_ getting fliers jammed into my letter box. I feel almost as violated as when I get marketing calls. What gives them the right to use my property like that and disturb me in my home? Not only that it's a blatant waste of resources, and I have to go to the effort of putting them in the paper recycling.
I can't see anything at all wrong with this. This is a classic business connecting a group of buyers and sellers who wouldn't have otherwise been connected. The sellers get their book sale and the buyers get their book at a reasonable price. Everyone wins. No different from any other shop that buys at factory price and sells at retail price.
After watching the video I don't think the IBM computer shown is meant to be in a Soviet facility. They talk about how the sound being played at the time is an actual signal from the Sputnik, which makes me think that it's meant to be an American signals interception facility. Maybe even with the IBM logo added to make that clear
;) Either way an awesome video.
Either that or they weren't immune to product placement in the 50's
1) CEOs proposed it and everyone knows they're all evil
When a group of IT company CEO's propose that you spend huge amounts on new IT infrastructure to consolidate your spending, you'd do damned well to look at it with suspicion. Especially when they appear to have neglected subtracting the amount that would have to be spent to realise these savings from their final figures.
I'm not sure what all the upset in the summary is about (Other than pulling eyeballs). This guy sounds like he actually knows what he is doing. He hasn't jumped on the panic bandwagon. In fact he's said a number of very logical things:
- Not all cyber attacks are a matter of national security. Even attacks on government infrastructure aren't necessarily matters of espionage.
- Conventional military strategies have nothing to do with maintaining a robust IT infrastructure.
That seems fairly level headed to me. Rather than all this panic about cyber-warfare as a broad collection of laws I'd like to see:
- Liability for corporations who fail to take basic security steps to protect customer data. E.g. you're in-house system gets compromised by an SQL-injection then you're liable. There is no reasonable excuse to still be running system vulnerable to SQL-injection. Or your un-patched systems are compromised then you're liable.
- Liability for software makers who sell software with easily preventable flaws. E.g. SQL-injections. I raise the point of SQL-injections because automatically checking code for insertion of strings into SQL statements should be trivial.
P.s. Sorry for the first and second halve of the post being only somewhat related.
Agree. In modern terms a 92% tax on income over $5,000,000 or so post deductions wouldn't be at all unreasonable, in my opinion. While I'm sure there are hard working CIOs, I doubt that they work so much harder and so much better than everyone else that it justifies them earning millions of dollars more than, for example, even extremely hard-working, extremely skilled, senior engineers at the same company.
.etc. as normal income. Close the blatant loopholes.
Also tax investment earnings
Electronic dictionaries for a long time have allowed note taking and modern dictionaries although small and dedicated are also often complete personal computers with wi-fi connectivity. My university had a policy of completely banning electronic dictionaries. Students could use a paper dictionary and that's it.
Any student who's taking regular classes at a university (or college in the States) should have passed an English test as part of their entry requirements. If their English is not up to scratch they should also have spent time doing supplementary study at an English college. I took regularly classes at a university in a country where I didn't speak the language natively. In any subject (and especially science subjects) a relatively small number of clearly defined terms will come out again and again in the course of studying the materials. It's hard to imagine how someone could fail to memorise those terms if they've studied properly.
Exams can be part of the learning process to!
.etc. A blanket policy would prevent exactly the kind of situation as what arose with the Korean girl.
There was an interesting article the other day on study methods in the NYT. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=1&ref=science&pagewanted=print)
Basically it talks about study methods backed up by psychological studies. Amongst that one of the more interesting points is that because of the difficulty of recalling knowledge in them, exams are a powerful tool for increasing the ability of students to recall knowledge.
Now I understand that what you're saying is that it's not necessary to memorise masses of equations because they can be looked up. However, it would seem necessary for students to have a working in memory knowledge of the principles of a field of knowledge, even if they can't remember the exact equations. Exams can be a powerful tool for helping students build that knowledge.
Btw. I'm surprised the original posters university doesn't have a blanket policy on dictionaries
Oh and on a side note most electronic dictionaries for a long time have allowed note taking in them and newer more expensive ones are basically complete computers with wifi connectivity. So anybody setting an exam should keep that in mind.
Although, personally, and having experienced studying overseas in normal classes (as opposed to language classes) in an environment where I wasn't a native speaker of the language, I think allowing any dictionaries in exams is a bit silly. Realistically if a student has learnt the materials properly they should be able to write about it. If they haven't mastered the jargon related to their field of study, then I think that raises serious questions about their knowledge of the field.
Getting a bit OT, but my original point is, if you're complaining about having to write your name in Katakana, then it wouldn't be fair to say that Japanese could work around the English site by filling in English forms using Roman characters. I know most of them are used to doing this, but still.
I have no problem with using Katakana. It's when you add character limits and so on on top of that when it becomes a problem.
I'm no Japanese, but I guess the vast majority of English websites would simply fail if you tried using a Japanese name (with Japanese characters). Worse, they might pretend to succeed and then get the encoding completely botched up
I've never meet a Japanese person who has issue fitting their name in English language forms. They just write it in roman characters.
The inverse is much harder when faced with arbitrary character limits and characters such as spaces being made illegal characters (particularly hard when you're trying to fit your first and middle name into a middle name field). This means often the only solution is tricks like using initials in roman characters from the wide-latin character set that is used in East Asian language computing.
I don't care if they keep or drop the policy at this point. I'm still not going to vote for them. They've shown their colours. Hopefully other voters who care about this issue are the same and show them that we care because Australia doesn't need both its major political parties appealing to the Christian right.
I find English websites are generally fairly good at handling names. At least in comparison to Japanese websites, which assume that you have a first name and last name only and often assume that your name can be written in only a few characters. They also have a nasty habit of deciding that certain characters are illegal.
It's always interesting trying to find ways to fit my 19 character full name into subscription forms on Japanese websites. Perhaps the worst one I encountered required me to use the initial of my first name using a full-width roman character (They banned ASCII characters so I had to use a roman character from the Japanese character set) and my last name written in Katakana.
Any fellow Aussie slashdoters have good recommendation for way to vote in protest to this kind of legislation?
I'm thinking of voting for the Greens in both houses. But I'm also wondering where to spread my preferences. Other than to the liberals and labor that is...
It's truly a sad period in our nations history when we have choices as abysmal as Tony Abbot and Kevin Rudd.
It's much easier to learn Chinese characters in Chinese than it is in Japanese because the phonetic portions for each character are maintained and the readings of the character is reflected in its structure. Furthermore you generally only have 1 reading per character.
.etc.) is "okonau". Both are written with the same character with the reading changing depending on the character following it. The past tense and conjunctive forms of the above verbs are written identically. However are of course read completely different. (itta / itte and okonatta / okonatte respectively). Furthermore the same character also has multiple Sino-readings associated with it. The main ones being "kou", "gou", and "gyou". These are used when the character is used as part of a "jukugo" (Nouns constructed with Chinese morphemes). Finally on top of that you have exceptional readings. For example the same character is used to write the "an" in "anka" (foot warmer).
In Japanese most characters have a Sino reading and a Japanese reading. The Sino reading can sometimes be deduced from the structure of the character however the Japanese reading is completely arbitrary and often changes completely based on the phonetic characters that follow it or even simply based on context.
For example the Japanese word for "to go" is "iku" and the Japanese word for "to hold" (a party, event
The worst by far though is names. Often Japanee people themselves can't read names correctly without knowing beforehand what the place is called. A favourite example of mine is the place name "Kasuga". It's written with the characters for spring and day. Now the Japanese words for spring and day are "haru" and "hi" respectively. So you would think when combined they would be read "haruhi" (And when used for people's names they are read "haruhi" when combined). If not "haruhi" another logical reading would be "shunjitsu" (using the Chinese readings of the character) and indeed there is a noun in Japanese read "Shunjitsu" which means spring day. However in place names for whatever reason when those two characters combine their reading changes to the completely arbitrary "Kasuga".
Now try learning that for several thousand characters and that's not to count the 1000 odd characters which aren't on the list but you need to know anyway if you want to be literate.
I've been learning Japanese for 4 years and have level 1 of the JLPT and I can say with confidence that this doesn't complicate anything for learners at all. If you're at all serious about learning Japanese you'll need to accept that the Jouyou-Kanji-Hyou (the list being discussed here) is not the definitive guide and you have to know lots of characters beyond that list. Most people would say about 3000 characters at least for literacy.
Government agencies might choose to avoid using kanji not on it. However they often ignore it. Some newspapers now days pay attention to it and replace characters not on it with katakana. For example 'hatan' is often written in newspapers with the character for 'yaburu' (i.e. 'ha') followed by tan written in katakana. Although even government agencies and newspapers use some characters which aren't on it. Everyone else just ignores it and uses whatever characters they see fit.
It was never designed to assist Japanese learners and (at least previously) contained some extremely rare characters which you seldom see used which omitting extremely common characters that you'd expect even a 8 year old to be able to read. (An 8 year old Japanese kid that is obviously)
P.s. According to the comments on the slashdot.jp article the characters mentioned there are a hidden reference to some dating sims titles (Or however you want to translate eroge).
Communication lag and inflexibility. That's why humans can do much, much more (like many orders of magnitude more) than any currently imaginable robot. Communication lag and inflexibility.
So why not put our efforts into improved AI systems? Obstacle avoidance doesn't seem exactly like an insurmountable problem. It seems a lot more realistic to develop better robotic technology than it does to send a human to mars. As a bonus the applications in industry of improved robotics technologies are huge.
Because what the Rovers have accomplished in [roughly] 4000 rover days could have been done in [roughly] 20 man days and probably done better to boot.
Are we talking Earth days are we talking Martian days? What's the basis of your estimate? For the cost of getting a man to Mars and back how much research could we do into robotic exploration? How much better could we make them? I'm still not seeing the value proposition of sending humans there.
That's the theory. In practice, the missions are almost always one shots, if a probe is lost it's game over for that mission. (The sole exception on Mars to date is the Phoenix lander, a cobbled together low budget 'replacement' for the lost Mars Polar Lander.)
Yeah and if the mission fails it's a pity and you move on. End of story. If a human dies in space it's a national tragedy and a huge failure. Either one is at risk of failure it's just that a failed non-manned mission is nowhere near as much of a setback in terms of moral or otherwise.
Private companies will not undertake the large-scale, visionary projects like sending people to Mars, building permanent bases on Mars and Moon, reaching Europa and exploring her oceans.
You don't need manned space flight to do any of those things. In-fact manned space flight is a terrible way to do those things. We're already doing awesome things and producing great science using robots. Why on earth would you want to do it with humans?
- We need food and oxygen. We can't run on solar power. Food and oxygen is added weight which given the cost of launching is the last thing you need.
- The risk of failure is much higher. If a human life is lost then it's a huge tragedy and setback. If a robot is lost it's a financial setback and you sit down and work out what went wrong and then have another go. No huge political or moral setback.
- We can push our knowledge of robotics to the limit and make new discoveries related to robotics.
When Obama said he'll cancel Constellation, he crushed the dreams and hopes of MY generation.
I'm in my 20's and I didn't feel very crushed. Let's say we do go back to the moon. What're people going to say? I'm imagining it would go something like: "Oh great we did that half a century ago. What's new?" Certainly going to Mars would be an enormous victory but you need to balance between spending huge amounts of money on something which has enormous propaganda but huge risks associated with failure vs. spending relatively little continuing to send robots up and generating tonnes of new scientific knowledge.
Google would be able to "diverge" its Android OS from the modifications made by the mobile phone operators - this would force them to rewrite their modifications from a version of Android to another, or to start back-porting into the version of Android they started with any change Google made.
Why would handset makers care about google "diverging" it's modifications? It's not like handset makers have exactly been known to care about keeping users up to date with the latest version. They could just take a snap shot of the Android code base make all the modifications they need and then run with it.
Do you know that the servers the government purchased to run these have memor that's ... made in Taiwan! Where the average annual income for a factory worker [taipeitimes.com] is a paltry US$1,150.00 annually! And don't even get me started on where the plastic casings came for the keyboards, servers and mice that comprise these servers!
Given Taiwan's status as almost a developed country $1150 annually seemed like a rather suspicious figure. So I read your linked article. It doesn't give a figure for factory workers but it puts the average worker at NT$36,564 per _month_. Or according to the first currency conversion site that came up on google about USD$1200 per month which is a hell of a lot higher than $1150 annually.
When the bubble economy [wikipedia.org] burst in 1990, the earning power of the Japanese male burst as well. The old assumptions collapsed. You didn't graduate a prestigious university and get a job for life. Much of the excesses of Sarariman life was forgiven because, well, he would bring home the salary. Now, after the burst of the bubble economy, employment was scarce and tenuous.
Although I doubt the bubble collapse helped, birth rates in Japan were on the way down long before that. It's been the same in Western societies with very liberal views towards women so I'm not sure you can say there is a correlation. I think the bigger problem for Japan is that the government has really failed to provide any support for parents. Also the last few generations have all moved from the countryside to the big cities but who would want to bring up children in those urban masses. Rent is hideously expensive and rooms are small and urban environments just aren't that nice a place to bring up children.
If an agent of INTERPOL is "just doing his job" then he can do whatever he wants. Fortunately for us INTERPOL is very limited in what it can do. INTERPOL's constitution is very clear as Article 3 states: It is strictly forbidden for the Organization to undertake any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character. http://www.interpol.int/public/icpo/legalmaterials/constitution/constitutiongenreg/constitution.asp [interpol.int]
Interpol doesn't even have agents or conduct investigations. Which makes any uproar even more silly.
Construction hubris and economic crash seem to be close companions.
Come on think about it for a bit. They didn't build this in the last few months. Burj Dubai was started during an economic boom. I doubt anyone was predicting that it would be completed in an economic crash.
Although you are right about construction and economic downturn going hand in hand. It's a great way for government to keep people employed reducing discontent. It can potentially have some follow through stimulus effects. It can be seen as a form of investment. I.e. the infrastructure has future value (generally speaking).
"The right to profit of your creation" doesn't necessarily imply "artificial scarcity", that's just one of the (many) models we've found for it.
I'm wondering what other models you know of and what their strength's and weaknesses are compared to a limited period of control over your creation. I'm not asking this to argue with you. I'm generally interested about what other models exist which offer sufficient profit incentives to get people to produce information (Be it books, movies, software whatever).
"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity - of artistic monopoly -- goes away."
I've always wondered why so many people on slashdot find the right to profit of your creation to be such a bad thing. (I.e. artificial scarcity). It's especially odd for a site full of software engineers .etc. whose livelihood often depends on artificial scarcity.
Take the iPhone for example. The materials that go into making an iPhone and those that go into making your average run of the mill phone are certainly not different enough to justify the price difference. The real difference is in the design - I.e. pure information with effectively no-limits to the amount it can be copied. Yet another company can't just use that information without Apple's permission - I.e. they can't just go off an make their own iPhone. Is this "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity" bad?
Or take Windows or any other peace of commercial software. It's purely information so the fact that I'm not free to copy and use it as much as I want must be "taxpayer-funded artificial scarcity". Is this bad?
The point is that making this information takes very real time and effort, whether it's designing a phone (or car or whatever), writing software, making a movie/song, or in this case writing a book. So what is so wrong with people having the right to demand payment for allowing people to utilise (Be it for entertainment, business or whatever) the information they have worked hard to create?
Now I'm not saying there shouldn't be limits to this right. But it seems that a lot of people just shout "Artificial scarcity" at anyone who raises their voice against piracy or whatever.
Now as for this guy, I think correlating the open source movement and piracy is stupid. People pirate stuff because they want things for free and the risks are so low. That's human nature, with or without the open-source movement.